First, I have to admit, after reading Kammen's VISUAL SHOCK a few years ago, I was more than excited to get in to the nuts and bolts of American Culture American Tastes. I don't want to sound too much like a fan-boy, but VISUAL SHOCK was one of the few cultural studies books I could get my hands on while in Korea, and it's a book I keep coming back to in terms of the direction and style I hope to implement in my own writing. This is not completely unrelated to my post. One of the streams that has run through almost all the texts for class is this relationship between how owning something (purchasing it vs. creating it) has an invariable impact the ways we construct our identities. I'm reminded of something one of my good friends once told me about meeting new people... She said “It doesn't matter what the person IS like, what matters is WHAT they like.”
In American Culture, American Tastes, Kammen is interested in this very relationship. I'm drawn to page 66, where Kammen states that, “By the 1920's, however, four decades of intensive immigration had opened the eyes of manufacturers and marketing people to the process of Americanization as an opportunity for expansive consumerism.” The impact of modernity upon personal identity, and it could be said collective identity (the way we identify with others), is largely hinged upon this ideas of social and relational designation through consumption.
Within democratic capitalism, its striking at how essential consumption is in designating not only class, but things like religion, sexuality, and ethnicity as well. However, sticking with just one of these, for the sake of brevity and the title of the book, let's stick to this idea of “American.” The general consensus I've gathered from the text is that this shift in niche marketing to immigrants and children of immigrants redefined what it means to be “American “within the nation's collective consciousness. No longer did American mean someone with citizenship who held a set of core ideals similar to those of other Americans. To be American meant, and I would argue still means, to consume and participate within Fordism and the inevitable Post-Fordism that followed. The national identity of those hoping to exist outside such a system has traditionally been called in to debate, slandered, and excised from the healthy body-politic. Black-listed, harassed, or even exiled. How democratic is consumer hyper-capitalism if it doesn't allow for anyone or anything to exist outside of it?
I can't believe I'm going to end my last post of the year with a quote from the flawed film 12 Monkeys, but... Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt's character) while locked down in the asylum erupts, “There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact - if you don't buy things - toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers... “
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